River House Quotes & Sayings

As I walked in the woods to see the birds and squirrels, so I walked in the village to see the men and boys; instead of the wind among the pines I heard the carts rattle. In one direction from my house there was a colony of muskrats in the river meadows; under the grove of elms and buttonwoods in the other horizon was a village of busy men, as curious to me as if they had been prarie-dogs, each sitting at the mouth of its burrow, or running over to a neighbor's to gossip. I went there frequently to observe their habits. — Henry David Thoreau

The old frame house down near the waterfront had never held so many people since the day it was put up. It must have been a pleasant place fifty years before: trees overhanging the limpid water, cows grazing in the meadows on both sides of the river, little frame houses like this one dotting the banks here and there.
It wasn't a pleasant place any more: garbage scows, coal yards, the river a greasy gray soup. Dead-end blocks of decrepit tenements on one side of it, lumberyards and ice-plants and tall stacks on the other.
The house was set far back from the street, hemmed in by the blank walls that rose around it.
("I Wouldn't Be In Your Shoes") — Cornell Woolrich

Moses and Aaron were directed to visit the riverside next morning, where the king was accustomed to repair. The overflowing of the Nile being the source of food and wealth for all Egypt, the river was worshiped as a god, and the monarch came thither daily to pay his devotions. Here the two brothers again repeated the message to him, and then they stretched out the rod and smote upon the water. The sacred stream ran blood, the fish died, and the river became offensive to the smell. The water in the houses, the supply preserved in cisterns, was likewise changed to blood. But "the magicians of Egypt did so with their enchantments," and "Pharaoh turned and went into his house, neither did he set his heart to this also." For seven days the plague continued, but without effect. — Ellen G. White

THE BLUE DRESS

Her blue dress is a silk train is a river
is water seeps into the cobblestone steps of my sleep, is still raining
is monsoon brocade, is winter stars stitched into puddles
is goodbye in a flooded, antique room, is goodbye in a room of crystal bowls
and crystal cups, is the ring-ting-ring of water dripping from the mouths
of crystal bowls and crystal cups, is the Mississippi river is a hallway, is leaks
like tears from windowsills of a drowned house, is windows open to waterfalls
is a bed is a small boat is a ship, is a currant come to carry me in its arms
through the streets, is me floating in her dress through the streets
is the moon sees me floating through the streets, is me in a blue dress
out to sea, is my mother is a moon out to sea. — Saeed Jones

Hermione looked far and far and George was a midge and a leaf was the size of a house and an acorn-cup would shelter herself ... for ... I am a tree planted by the river of water ... I am in the word tree. I am tree exactly. — H.D.

A lifelong insomniac, I sleep like one newly dead every night and dream deeply harmonious dreams of swimming along with the current in a clear green river, playing and at home in the water. On the first night, I dreamed that the real name of the house was not Bramasole but Cento Angeli, One Hundred Angels, and that I would discover them one by one. Is it bad luck to change the name of a house, as it is to rename a boat? As a trepid foreigner, I wouldn't. But for me, the house now has a secret name as well as its own name. — Frances Mayes

When all of the family was stilled in sleep, when the streetlamp a few paces from the house shone at night and made grotesque shadows of the trees upon the house, when the river sighed off into the darkness, when the trains hooted on their way to Montreal far upriver, when the winds swished in the soft treeleaves and something knocked and rattled on the old barn, you could stand in the road and look at this home and know that there is nothing more haunting than a house at night when the family is asleep, something strangely tragic, something beautiful forever. — Jack Kerouac

My son." Hades tone was almost gentle. "Whatever happens, you have earned my respect. You brought honor to our house when we stood together against Kronos in Manhattan. You risked my wrath to help the Jackson boy, helping him to the River Styx, freeing him from my prison, pleading with me to raise the armies of Erebos to assist him. Never before have I been so harassed by one of my sons. Percy this and Percy that. I nearly blasted you to cinders. — Rick Riordan

I can't do this anymore, I think, my own voice almost lost in the storm. I can't do this anymore. I can't face this on my own. I am drowning in this river and I am haunted in this house my father built and my mind is breaking. — T.J. Klune

It still strikes me as strange that anyone could have any moral objection to someone else's sexuality. It's like telling someone else how to clean their house. — River Phoenix

Another big step was building a house here in Stillwater. Avery's ancestry had claimed some prime property looking down along the St. Croix River. He chose to custom build their home, working endlessly with architects and builders, trying to make a perfect home for his Kane to live in. Kane insisted Avery spent too much money, and every time he gave input, it was designed to save them money. Avery nixed most of those ideas, stating very clearly this was their dream home, the perfect place for his prince to live his life in style. — Kindle Alexander

My hand was on the door handle when for a split second out of nowhere I was terrified, blue-blazing terrified, fear dropping straight through me like a jagged black stone falling fast. I'd felt this before, in the limbo instants before I moved out of my aunt's house, lost my virginity, took my oath as a police officer: those instants when the irrevocable thing you wanted so much suddenly turns real and solid, inches away and speeding at you, a bottomless river rising and no way back once it's crossed. I had to catch myself back from crying out like a little kid drowning in terror, I don't want to do this any more. — Tana French

You must build your House of Parliament on the river: so ... that the populace cannot exact their demands by sitting down round you. — Duke Of Wellington

We set the town on fire and burned down every house as a warning to other small towns along the river. — Knute Nelson

Eyes see only dust and earth, but feel with the heart, and know pure joy.
The delights blossom on all sides in every form, but where is your heart's thread to make a wreath of them?
My master's flute sounds through all things, drawing me out of my lodgings wherever they may be, and while I listen I know that every step I take is in my master's house.
For he is the sea, he is the river that leads to the sea, and he is the landing-place. — Rabindranath Tagore

Could you bring me to Rita's house before we go to the airport?" I ask. "There's one last thing I need to ask her to do." "That is on the other side of the river," says Ethan."I know. But I need to see her. Please, I'll be eternally grateful." He doesn't say anything, but instead puts the car in gear and starts the engine. After we are driving for about two minutes he asks. "How grateful?" Ah, I see the old Ethan hasn't disappeared then. I smile and lean over to place a light peck on his cheek. "This grateful," I say to him."Hmm, I think you can do better than that," he chides in good humor.
"You're driving," is all I say in reply.
"I can pull over," he answers smartly. — L. H. Cosway

The torrent, swollen by the melting snow, plunges into a tremendous abyss, from which the spray rolls up like the smoke from a burning house. The shaft into which the river hurls itself is an immense chasm, lined by glistening coal-black rock, and narrowing into a creaming, boiling pit of incalculable depth, which brims over and shoots the stream onward over its jagged lip. The long sweep of green water roaring forever down, and the thick flickering curtain of spray hissing forever upward, turn a man giddy with their constant whirl and clamor. — Arthur Conan Doyle

I am the Muskrat," said the wretched creature faintly. "A philosopher, you know. I should just like to point out that your bridge-building activities have completely ruined my house in the river bank, and although ultimately it doesn't matter what happens, I must say even a philosopher does not care for being soaked to the skin. — Tove Jansson

....one of those long, romantic novels, six hundred and fifty pages of small print, translated from French or German or Hungarian or something -- because few of the English ones have the exact feeling I mean. And you read one page of it or even one phrase of it, and then you gobble up all the rest and go about in a dream for weeks afterwards, for months afterwards -- perhaps all your life, who knows? -- surrounded by those six hundred and fifty pages, the houses, the streets, the snow, the river, the roses, the girls, the sun, the ladies' dresses and the gentlemen's voices, the old, wicked, hard-hearted women and the old, sad women, the waltz music -- everything. What is not there you put in afterwards, for it is alive, this book, and it grows in your head. 'The house I was living in when I read that book,' you think, or 'This colour reminds me of that book. — Jean Rhys

Home was that lone house on its great bend of Chatham River, no destination anymore but only the source of a vague sadness he thought of as "homegoing," a returning to the lost paradise of true belonging. — Peter Matthiessen

The Eliots found it a queer sort of evening - a transition evening. Hitherto the Herb of Grace had been to them a summer home; they had known it only permeated with sun and light, flower-scented, windows and doors open wide. But now doors were shut, curtains drawn to hide the sad, grey dusk. Instead of the lap of the water against the river wall they heard the whisper of the flames, and instead of the flowers in the garden they smelt the roasting chestnuts, burning apple logs, the oil lamps, polish - all the home smells. This intimacy with the house was deepening; when winter came it would be deeper still. Nadine glanced over her shoulder at the firelight gleaming upon the dark wood of the panelling, at the shadows gathering in the corners, and marvelled to see how the old place seemed to have shrunk in size with the shutting out of the daylight. It seemed gathering them in, holding them close. — Elizabeth Goudge

In the late summer of that year we lived in a house in a village that looked across the river and the plain to the mountains. In the bed of the river there were pebbles and boulders, dry and white in the sun, and the water was clear and swiftly moving and blue in the channels. Troops went by the house and down the road and the dust they raised powdered the leaves of the trees. The trunks of the trees too were dusty and the leaves fell early that year and we saw the troops marching along the road and the dust rising and leaves, stirred by the breeze, falling and the soldiers marching and afterward the road bare and white except for the leaves. — Ernest Hemingway,

Emptiness is the track on which the centered person moves," said a Tibetan sage six hundred years ago, and the book where I found this edict followed it with an explanation of the word "track" in Tibetan: shul, "a mark that remains after that which made it has passed by - a footprint for example. In other contexts, shul is used to describe the scarred hollow in the ground where a house once stood, the channel worn through rock where a river runs in flood, the indentation in the grass where an animal slept last night. — Rebecca Solnit

The night-soil men can see a bird walking in trees. It isn't a bird. It is a woman who has removed her skin and is on her way to drink the blood of her secret enemies. It is a woman who has left her skin i a corner of a house made out of wood. It is a woman who is reasonable and admires honeybees in the hibiscus. — Jamaica Kincaid

Was memory like a river that slowed over time to a trickle? Or was it like a house with many rooms that became a house with fewer rooms and then finally just a single room you could never leave? Was that the worst fate in the world? It depended, Wyatt supposed, on what room you ended up in. — Lou Berney

My name used to be in the papers daily
As having dined somewhere,
Or traveled somewhere,
Or rented a house in Paris,
Where I entertained the nobility.
I was forever eating or traveling,
Or taking the cure at Baden-Baden.
Now I am here to do honor
To Spoon River, here beside the family whence I sprang.
No one cares now where I dined,
Or lived, or whom I entertained,
Or how often I took the cure at Baden-Baden! — Edgar Lee Masters

There's a house across the river, but alas, I cannot swim
I'll live my life regretting that I never jumped in — Laura Marling

They'd fallen into an easy routine, the three of them. Breakfast together in the morning, then Hughie would leave for work and she and Nell would get started in the house. Lil found she liked having a second shadow, enjoyed showing Nell things, explaining how they worked and why. Nell was a big one for asking why-why did the sun hide at night, why didn't the fire flames leap out of the gate, why didn't the river get bored and run the other way?-and Lil loved supplying answers, watching as understanding dawned on Nell's little face. For the first time in her life, Lil felt useful, needed, whole. — Kate Morton

I mean honestly, who just sits around in a house with a bunch of short guys waiting for their prince to come? So your mom is a bitch and wants to kill you because her mirror told her to? Cry me a river why don't you? Your big plan is sitting around cleaning house waiting for the other shoe to drop? And speaking of shoes, everyone has been picked on by mean girls. You do not wait for some old lady to pop in and transmogrify some innocent rodents just so you can sneak in to a dance under false pretenses. And let's say you do sneak in. For the love of all that is holy take your mask off and look the guy in the face and say. "Hi, I'm Cindy from down the street, I have this thing at midnight. Can we do coffee later?" This nonsense with a shoe and searching the entire village for one girl, it's crap. — John Goode

I didn't mean to upset you, Ms. Hamilton," his gaze shifted back to her. "It's a beautiful sight and I thought you'd like to see it." She gasped in delight at the vista before her. Distant purple mountains framed lush green meadows speckled with brown dots of cattle. A silver river threaded through clumps of trees. In the middle of the valley, ranch buildings clustered around a large white house. Elizabeth inhaled crisp air into her lungs... — Debra Holland

When the windows like the jackal's eye and desire pierce the dawn, silken windlasses lift me up to suburban footbridges. I summon a girl who is dreaming in the little gilded house; she meets me on the piles of black moss and offers me her lips which are stones in the rapid river depths. Veiled forebodings descend the buildings' steps. The best thing is to flee from the great feather cylinders when the hunters limp into the sodden lands. If you take a bath in the watery patterns of the streets, childhood returns to the country like a greyhound. Man seeks his prey in the breezes and the fruits are drying on the screens of pink paper, in the shadow of the names overgrown by forgetfulness. Joys and sorrows spread in the town. Gold and eucalyptus, similarly scented, attack dreams. Among the bridles and the dark edelweiss subterranean forms are resting like perfumers' corks. — Andre Breton

This man threatened the volunteer then returned twenty minutes later to beat him up. At a charity bonfire. In Wilford. It's not the Middle East," she said, "it's Wilford, Nottingham. I don't want to be among these people. They complain about a charity bonfire, and right on their doorstep there are children as young as eleven selling drugs along the river. — Richard House

The two men were slowly pacing the terrace in front of Dr. Raymond's house. The sun still hung above the western mountain-line, but it shone with a dull red glow that cast no shadows, and all the air was quiet; a sweet breath came from the great wood on the hillside above, and with it, at intervals, the soft murmuring call of the wild doves. Below, in the long lovely valley, the river wound in and out between the lonely hills, and, as the sun hovered and vanished into the west, a faint mist, pure white, began to rise from the hills. Dr. Raymond turned sharply to his friend. Safe? Of course it is. In itself the operation is a perfectly simple one; any surgeon could do it. — Arthur Machen

I live in a market town in a mill house with the river running both sides and Somerfield's car park only a loose nine iron away, and I really, really, really love it. — David Hemmings

Until I was four years old I lived in the house of my paternal grandfather, about two miles from the pretty little village of Wallace, at the mouth of the river of that name. — Simon Newcomb

I am going to sit here in the river. If you go home to sleep, I will sleep in front of your house. And if you go away, I will follow you
until you tell me to go away. Then I'll leave. But I have to love you for the rest of my life.. — Paulo Coelho

The woman turned and went slowly into the house. As she passed the doors she turned and looked back. Grave and thoughtful was her glance, as she looked on the king with cool pity in here eyes. Very fair was her face, and her long hair was like a river of gold. Slender and tall she was in her white robe girt with silver; but strong she seemed and stern as steel, a daughter of kings. — J.R.R. Tolkien

Yesterday in the restaurant, she'd seen his sex appeal and roughness. At her house, she'd seen his danger. This morning, at the river, she'd seen his beauty and teasing, and again that danger.
Of all of them, the tenderness she saw now was the most compelling. And terrifying. — Barbara Samuel

Each of these "houses of hope" had their own unique "ingredients" based on their inheritance, but I also saw some common ingredients that were shared by all: ... In conclusion, the Lord is saying, "Because of what has been loosed on the earth, angels are ascending and descending, as well as demons. My people must run into the house of hope! The river will take you there! This is not a fearful thing. Respond!" I am hearing the Lord giving this call to the nations. Don't be like Reuben in Judges 5, who couldn't decide, Do I go, do I stay? The Lord is shouting, "Run into that house of hope!" — Bob Hartley

This is what makes me crazy in this family, Dad. I don't care that you hit us. I really don't. That's over and there's nothing any of us can do about it. But I can't stand it when I state a simple fact about this family's history and I'm told by you or Mom that it didn't happen. But you've got to know, Dad, and I'm saying this as a son who loves you, that you were a shit to your kids. Not all the time. Not every day. Not every month. But we never knew what would set you off. We never knew when your temper would explode and we'd have the strongest shrimper on the river knocking us around the house. So we learned to be afraid without making a sound. And Mom was a loyal wife to you, Dad. She would never let us tell a soul that you were hitting us. Most of the time, she was like you and would simply tell us it didn't happen the way we remembered it. — Pat Conroy

Despite the chaos, our family had a solid routine. Weekends were spent at the cabin where we enjoyed the quiet. A few times a week, Raven and Lark trained at Big Bob's. My kids and I cawed for mommy during games. Once a week, we dropped by Cooper's new house to add to his chaos.
At least twice a week, we lived at the bowling alley. All the kids loved the game and River was quite talented like his pop. Our youngest Nevaeh even enjoyed bowling before she was born. Every time we were at the alley, the baby would kick the hell out of Raven. My woman responded by eating nachos. While I never understood the plan behind dosing our unborn kid with cheese, who was I to question her tactics? — Bijou Hunter

constantly before his eyes now was a river flowing from him; and it was as if he himself and his house and the wealth he had accumulated over many decades were flowing away like the river, while he was too old and too weak to oppose the powerful current. — Patrick Suskind

ON THE BANKS of every great river you'll find a monument to excess."
Kanai recalled the list of examples Nirmal had provided to prove this: the opera house of Manaus, the temple of Karnak, the ten thousand pagodas of Pagan. In the years since, he had visited many of those places, and it made him laugh to think his uncle had insisted that Canning too had a place on that list: "The mighty Matla's monument is Port Canning. — Amitav Ghosh

He who sits still in a house all the time may be the greatest vagrant of all; but the saunterer, in the good sense, is no more vagrant than the meandering river, which is all the while sedulously seeking the shortest course to the sea. — Henry David Thoreau

Shepherd Book: What are we up to, sweetheart?
River: Fixing your Bible.
Book: I, um ... What?
River: Bible's broken. Contradictions, false logistics - doesn't make sense.
Shepherd Book: No, no. You-you-you can't ...
River: So we'll integrate non-progressional evolution theory with God's creation of Eden. Eleven inherent metaphoric parallels already there. Eleven. Important number. Prime number. One goes into the house of eleven eleven times, but always comes out one. Noah's ark is a problem.
Shepherd Book: Really?
River: We'll have to call it early quantum state phenomenon. Only way to fit 5000 species of mammal on the same boat.
Shepherd Book: River, you don't fix the Bible.
River: It's broken. It doesn't make sense.
Book: It's not about making sense. It's about believing in something, and letting that belief be real enough to change your life. It's about faith. You don't fix faith, River. It fixes you. — Ben Edlund

When my own mother died, there seemed to me to be no answer to anything. For a time the only universality was death. And then I remember walking in the dusk along the quiet little street toward the house now so empty and meaningless. There was light enough from the sky to cast the lattice shadow of leaves on the walk. The sound of the river was steady and swift, and the air smelled of sulphur from the mills beyond it. As I looked up, a delicate petal of moon drifted into the tender blue, and all at once I thought, How beautiful God made the world! How wonderful that the stars still shine! And I was comforted. — Gladys Taber

I journeyed to London, to the timekept City, Where the River flows, with foreign flotations. There I was told: we have too many churches, And too few chop-houses. — T. S. Eliot

Hazel squinted. "How far?"
"Just over the river and through the woods."
Percy raised an eyebrow. "Seriously? To Grandmother's house we go?"
Frank cleared his throat. "Yeah, anyway. — Rick Riordan

I've often wish'd that I had clear, For life, six hundred pounds a year; A handsome house to lodge a friend; A river at my garden's end; A terrace walk, and half a rood Of land set out to plant a wood. — Jonathan Swift

And Jabim is the Lord of broken things, who sitteth behind the house to lament the things that are cast away. And there he sitteth lamenting the broken things until the worlds be ended, or until someone cometh to mend the broken things. Or sometimes he sitteth by the river's edge to lament the forgotten things that drift upon it.
A kindly god is Jabim, whose heart is sore if anything be lost. — Lord Dunsany

In September countless sand and house-martins jazz above the river, taking insects from the surface, from the air, thousands of birds kissing the river farewell. They creak, a sound like the air rubbing against itself. Summer is everything they know; they're preparing themselves, sensing in the shortening days a door they must dash through before it shuts. — Kathleen Jamie

I'm in this absolutely gorgeous manor house with acres of quite beautiful countryside. I've got trout in the river, an organic vegetable garden, I've got my work 40 yards from my home. I don't mind being criticised, but where are they criticising from? Which hut are they criticising me from, exactly? — Jay Kay

My girlfriend and I rented a nice house on the river and I was there for about two and a half months, and we were just out of Alabama. I hardly got to see Alabama. — Albert Finney

It was not a bed with curtains, but a bed with doors like shutters. This may not seem like a nice way of having a bed, but we would all be glad of the wooden curtains about us at night if we lived in such a cottage, on the side of a hill along which the wind swept like a wild river. Through the cottage it would be streaming all night long. And a poor woman with a cough, or a man who has been out in the cold all day, is very glad of such a place to lie in, and leave the the rest of the house to the wind and the fairies. — George MacDonald

I know what I wish. I wish some Day that I might live by a River - one that is strong of current & silent; & above it, in the Pines, the Hawks shall call; & I shall live there in a small House of one Room & play the Violin, & Someone Else shall play the Harpsichord, & we will be far from all Human Habitation. We shall walk by the Banks of that River, & listen to the Buzzing of the Rushes, & that alone shall be our Company. — M T Anderson

The [Gila River area is] so utterly desolate, desert, and Godforsaken, that Kit Carson says a wolf could not make his living upon it." | U.S. Representative THOMAS HART BENTON addressing the house of representatives, June 26, 1854 — Margot Mifflin

Pittsburg is like Birmingham in England; at least its townspeople say so. Setting aside the streets, the shops, the houses, waggons, factories, public buildings, and population, perhaps it may be. It certainly has a great quantity of smoke hanging about it, and is famous for its iron-works. Besides the prison to which I have already referred, this town contains a pretty arsenal and other institutions. It is very beautifully situated on the Alleghany River, over which there are two bridges; and the villas of the wealthier citizens sprinkled about the high grounds in the neighbourhood, are pretty enough. We lodged at a most excellent hotel, and were admirably served. As usual it was full of boarders, was very large, and had a broad colonnade to every story of the house. — Charles Dickens

Over the river and through the wood
To grandfather's house we go — Lydia Maria Francis Child

But is life really worth so much? Let us examine this; it's a different inquiry. We will offer no solace for so desolate a prison house; we will encourage no one to endure the overlordship of butchers. We shall rather show that in every kind of slavery, the road of freedom lies open. I will say to the man to whom it befell to have a king shoot arrows at his dear ones [Prexaspes], and to him whose master makes fathers banquet on their sons' guts [Harpagus]: 'What are you groaning for, fool?... Everywhere you look you find an end to your sufferings. You see that steep drop-off? It leads down to freedom. You see that ocean, that river, that well? Freedom lies at its bottom. You see that short, shriveled, bare tree? Freedom hangs from it.... You ask, what is the path to freedom? Any vein in your body. — Seneca.

In the White House now was James Polk, a Democrat, an expansionist, who, on the night of his inauguration, confided to his Secretary of the Navy that one of his main objectives was the acquisition of California. His order to General Taylor to move troops to the Rio Grande was a challenge to the Mexicans. It was not at all clear that the Rio Grande was the southern boundary of Texas, although Texas had forced the defeated Mexican general Santa Anna to say so when he was a prisoner. The traditional border between Texas and Mexico had been the Nueces River, about 150 miles to the north, and both Mexico and the United States had recognized that as the border. However, Polk, encouraging the Texans to accept annexation, had assured them he would uphold their claims to the Rio Grande. Ordering troops to the Rio Grande, into territory inhabited by Mexicans, was clearly a provocation. — Howard Zinn

While still practising law, he'd run a hearse-rental agency. Then, later, he'd bought into a handkerchief factory in Baker Park. Their most famous innovation was the funeral hankerchief, a plain white cotton handkerchief with a black border. Not long afterwards he patented the first black-edged tissue. He'd made millions, apparently, though nobody knew what he'd done with the money. His only extravagance had been to install an elevator in the house, so he could move between floors without getting out of his wheelchair.
'So what did he mean about hearing money?' Jed asked.
'It's his factory across the river. He claims he can hear the money being made. — Rupert Thomson

You make me thirsty, Promethea, my river, you make me eternally thirsty, my water. As if I had spent my life in an old house of dried mud, so dry myself that I could not even thirst, until yesterday. And suddenly yesterday, the dusty floor of my old house burst open and while I was still dozing away my parched existence, drop by drop I heard the music of coolness awaken the thirst under my dry soul. And leaning over the dark shaft of my life, I saw my childhood springs unearthed. Is that always how (by accident) we rediscover Magdalenian riches? — Helene Cixous

The town was very nice and our house was very fine. The river ran behind us and the town had been captured very handsomely but the mountains beyond it could not be taken and I was very glad the Austrians seemed to want to come back to the town some time, if the war should end, because they did not bombard it to destroy it but only a little in a military way. — Ernest Hemingway,

How joyful to be together, alone as when we first were joined in our little house by the river long ago, except that now we know each other, as we did not then; and now instead of two stories fumbling to meet, we belong to one story that the two, joining, made. And now we touch each other with the tenderness of mortals, who know themselves — Wendell Berry

A few miles away across the East River was the apartment he could never get used to, the job where he had nothing to do, the dozen or so people he knew slightly and cared about not at all: a fabric of existence as blank and seamless as the freshly plaster wall he passed. Soon his wife would return from New Jersey. Soon everyone would be back, and things would go on much as they had before. From the street outside came the sound of laughter and shouting, bottles breaking, voices droning in the warm air, and children playing far past their bedtime. It all meant nothing whatever to Lowell. Standing in the parlor of a house no longer his, listening to the voices of people whose lives were closed to him forever, contemplating a future much like his past, he realized that it was finally too late for him. Everything had gone wrong, and he had succeeded at nothing, and he was never going to have any kind of life at all. — L.J. Davis

Would you like to see where I will build your house, m'lady?"
She grinned. "You mean our house?"
He mirrored her smile. "Aye."
Taking her hand, he led her along the path to the mouth of the River Coe. They stood on a curved peninsula high above the river where it would be free from floods. Hugh spread his arms wide and looked across Loch Leven. "The hills of Glencoe will be our backdrop, the river of the Coe will be our music, and our galleys will sail through the water of the Leven to Loch Linnhe and out to sea. Mark me, my love, Clan Iain Abrach will rebuild, and will once again rule these lands."
He looked into her eyes and saw joy there. "And you will be my queen. — Amy Jarecki

If he died now, Grainier probably wouldn't know it until they came into the light of the gas lamps either side of the doctor's house. After they'd moved along for nearly an hour without conversation, listening only to the creaking wagon and the sound of the nearby river and the clop of the mares, it grew dark. — Denis Johnson

What most people find festive - a weekend at a beach shack with friends, a boat trip down a river, a crackling bonfire on a summer night - I see as a bleak nightmare to be grimly endured. I would sooner put lit cigarettes in my eyes than share a vacation house with a crowd. — Jancee Dunn

I made a very conscious effort to finish 'The Cypress House' before 'So Cold the River' launched, because I thought that would help build a buffer between my writing and any impact that came from either the success or the failure of that first book. — Michael Koryta

Enormous oak trees towered over the boulevard, which boasted homes with fine woodwork, wraparound porches, and moss on the sidewalks. 'There's nothing like a house in New Orleans. Would you look at those balconies and columns?' He rolled his window down to take in the sounds of life in New Orleans. — Hunter Murphy

There was a zone she had not explored. She could use the same counter, the same sort of password that she used with all these people, but she had passed over in the twinkling of an eye into another forest. This forest was reality. There, the very speaking of the words, conjured up answering sigil, house and barn and terrace and castle and river and little plum tree. A whole world was open. She looked in through a wide doorway. — H.D.

Ludlow ... is probably the loveliest town in England with its hill of Georgian houses ascending from the river Teme to the great tower of the cross-shaped church, rising behind a classic market building. — John Betjeman

to live with you forever. I want to buy the house on the river from my brothers, and I want you to have the coach house for your studio. I want to love you and make love to you every day and make up for every shitty day you ever had. I love you. — Victoria James

And even as this old guide-book boasts of the, to us, insignificant Liverpool of fifty years ago, the New York guidebooks are now vaunting of the magnitude of a town, whose future inhabitants, multitudinous as the pebbles on the beach, and girdled in with high walls and towers, flanking endless avenues of opulence and taste, will regard all our Broadways and Bowerys as but the paltry nucleus to their Nineveh. From far up the Hudson, beyond Harlem River where the young saplings are now growing, that will overarch their lordly mansions with broad boughs, centuries old; they may send forth explorers to penetrate into the then obscure and smoky alleys of the Fifth Avenue and Fourteenth Street; and going still farther south, may exhume the present Doric Custom-house, and quote it as a proof that their high and mighty metropolis enjoyed a Hellenic antiquity. — Herman Melville

At that exact moment, 6-0-0, the sun climbed over the skyline of oaks, revealing its full summer angry-god self. Its reflection flared across the river toward our house, a long, blaring finger aimed at me through our frail bedroom curtains. Accusing: You have been seen. You will be seen. — Gillian Flynn

Go, little book, and wish to all
Flowers in the garden, meat in the hall,
A bin of wine, a spice of wit,
A house with lawns enclosing it,
A living river by the door,
A nightingale in the sycamore! — Robert Louis Stevenson

The forty days of the soul begin on the morning after death. That first night, before its forty days begin, the soul lies still against sweated-on pillows and watches the living fold the hands and close the eyes, choke the room with smoke and silence to keep the new soul from the doors and the windows and the cracks in the floor so that it does not run out of the house like a river. The living know that, at daybreak, the soul will leave them and make its way to the places of its past ... and sometimes this journey will carry it so far for so long that it will forget to come back. — Tea Obreht

It's a rented house right along the Mississippi River, a house that screams Suburban Nouveau Riche, the kind of place I aspired to as a kid from my split-level, shag-carpet side of town. The kind of house that is immediately familiar: a generically grand, unchallenging, new, new, new house that my wife would-and did-detest. 'Should I remove my soul before I come inside?' Her first line upon arrival. — Gillian Flynn

Vasco lived in Mangrove Heights, on a bluff overlooking the river. The first time Jed saw the house, he couldn't help thinking of the Empire of Junk. Towers jostled with gables, beams with columns. Gargoyles leered from the eaves, tongues sharp as the heads of arrows, eyes like shelled eggs. The front garden had been planted with all kinds of trees, so the house seemed to skulk. The path to the front door crackled with dead leaves. He could smell plaster, the inside of birds' nests, river sewage.
'I should have been born in a place like this,' Jed said, but Vasco was opening the door and didn't hear. — Rupert Thomson

It was a bad night to be about with such a feeling in one's heart. The rain was cold, pitiless and increasing. A damp, keen wind blew down the cross streets leading from the river. The fumes of the gas works seemed to fall with the rain. The roadway was muddy; the pavement greasy; the lamps burned dimly; and that dreary district of London looked its very gloomiest and worst.
("The Old House In Vauxhall Road") — Charlotte Riddell

And he had all these wild projects, and I love that, because he is his dreams, and without his dreams he'd be empty and tired, but those dreams were crazy sometimes, all the projects, all the stuff in the house, all the machines, all the thousands of hours he could have been doing something for money, but he is who he is, a dreamer, impractical and practical, I know that, and I love him for who he is, I know that, and I am not perfect either, a dreamer too ... — Brian Doyle

I went upstairs to my room. Momentarily I felt a sense of calm, almost acceptance. Rest beyond the river. I knew now what that meant. It meant Nothing. It meant only silence forever. — Margaret Laurence

And if there is water there let it be from a river. And if there is peace let it be from silence and forgetting. From the slow settle of dust on a house worn down, on a history lost, on a woman buried quietly into geography. And if there is memory let it be disjointed and nonsensical, let it disturb understanding and logic, let it rise like birds or hands into the blood blue bone of the sky, whispering its nothing beyond telling. ( ... ) Let someone lose the captions to all of the photographs; let them pile into new logics and forms that outlive us.
- "Siberia: Still Life of a Moving Image" (6. Representation) — Lidia Yuknavitch

It was a lovely summer weather in the country, and the golden corn, the green oats, and the haystacks piled up in the meadows looked beautiful. The stork walking about on his long red legs chattered in the Egyptian language, which he had learnt from his mother. The corn-fields and meadows were surrounded by large forests, in the midst of which were deep pools. It was, indeed, delightful to walk about in the country. In a sunny spot stood a pleasant old farm-house close by a deep river, and from the house down to the water side grew great burdock leaves, so high, that under the tallest of them a little child could stand upright. The spot was as wild as the centre of a thick wood. In — Hans Christian Andersen

Raised herself on one round elbow and looked out on a tiny river like a gleaming blue snake winding itself around a purple hill. Right below the house was a field white as snow with daisies, and the shadow of the huge maple tree that bent over the little house fell lacily across it. Far beyond it were the white crests of Four Winds Harbour and a long range of sun-washed dunes and red cliffs. — L.M. Montgomery

Behind them in the garden the little stone house brooded among the shadows. It was lonely but not forsaken. It had not yet done with dreams and laughter and the joy of life; there were to be future summers for the little stone house; meanwhile, it could wait. And over the river in purple durance the echoes bided their time. — L.M. Montgomery

A springlike autumn's balmy breeze reaches afar. The sun shines on the house of a recluse South of the river; They encourage the December apricots To burst into bloom: A simplehearted person Faces the simplehearted flowers. — Sun Bu'er